A Touch of Hope
by Victoria to Worthing
Summary: Jate... Kate's thoughts during her very first meeting with Jack, so no spoilers unless you haven't even watched the pilot!


She was always scared when someone talked to her. Sometimes it showed, but not most of the time. She was a good actress, sometimes. She was good at many things, but she knew she was not ever just _good. _When you are on the run, you are in hiding, even in plain sight, and she never forgot.

Except when he talked to her that day.

She was scared, disoriented. Who wouldn't be? They had just fallen from the sky, barely escaping death. She had often heard that emergencies and injuries knocked everything else out of your head, and it was true. For the moments on the beach, she was not a fugitive. She wasn't even really Kate. She was just afraid.

When she looked around at the people surrounding her, she realized that to them, she wasn't really anything. To them, she could be a housewife, or a simple wanderer, or a cocktail waitress. Who would guess she was a murderer? She let herself relax for a moment, feeling the weight of her burden slide away into oblivion for one moment. She felt the marks that the handcuffs had left on her arms begin to fade. She put her fingers on the places they used to be, feeling only skin. It could be anyone's skin.

And then she ran into him, on the edge of the jungle. He was tall and strong, good-looking, the kind of man that you could tell was in charge. You could tell he led a good life, a straightforward life, with security and virtue always there, taken for granted. The kind of man she admired and feared.

He asked for her help. He talked to her like she was a person. In the time since she had left Kevin, she had already become unaccustomed to being talked to or looked out and not being afraid that someone would see through her. When she was afraid to do what he asked (for even in her many adventures, she'd never given anybody stitches), he didn't see anything strange in it. Anyone would react that way. She let herself readjust to feeling normal, to _being_ normal. Who could prove she wasn't? Maybe she even she could forget the truth.

And as she talked to him, as she touched his skin (surprisingly soft), for a moment she felt something foreign.

Hope.

Someone could trust her again. Someone good and strong and brave could think that she was a person who could take care of someone, who would not fail or run. The kind of man she had always feared sat before her, hurt and kind, telling her his secret of how fear was overcome. He told her he was a doctor. He saved lives every day, the direct inverse of Kate, who destroyed all she touched, but he didn't see that part of her.

He told a harrowing story of one of the lives he had saved, of how he was afraid and overcame it. Kate knew how fear could drive you—it was what kept her alive and alert on the road. It could be her greatest asset.

But it was always her greatest weakness.

The fear made her run.

After he told her the story, she imagined him, the upright hero, counting to five in his head as he did the right thing and saved the day. She tried to imagine herself like that for a moment, but realized the folly of it.

"If that had been me, I think I would have run for the door," she admitted, slapping herself back down to earth as she let him see a little of what she really was.

"No," he said.

For a moment she felt surprised, and deceitful, and blessed.

"I don't think that's true. You're not running now."

She let this benediction sink into her soul. It was true. She hadn't run. She had done something for someone else that helped them without hurting them at all. (Not like Tom, not like Kevin, not like her mother.) If she could remember this, this one act, even one time when she had not failed, maybe she could change.

Maybe she was already a little different.

Maybe it was him. Maybe his own goodness had rubbed off on her. He had so much that it overflowed into her.

As he smiled at her, she let herself trust him, even as she hoped that he would continue to trust her. Her secret hope was that she would never let that trust down.

_I hope I never have to run away from you_, she thought.

She began to doubt that she ever could.


End file.
